by Vox Day
“Looks like you’re some kind of lodestone for trouble,” Plate Armor said with a wry smile.
“You might say that,” Lodi agreed. “The King knows. I’ve been out walking the overground on assignment for him.”
The two dwarves looked at each other, although Lodi couldn’t tell if they were impressed or alarmed. “Anything to do with the war?” asked Plate Armor.
“You might say that too.” Despite the pain from his wounds, Lodi felt as if a heavy weight had been lifted off his shoulders. For months, he had been nagged by the thought that Thorald might not have made it back to Iron Mountain with either the King’s shield they’d retrieved from the drake or news of the tremendous orc invasion. He’d wondered if he should have accepted the elven offer to fly both of them there, or if he’d done the right thing by going in search of the one Man family he’d known would listen to him. Of course, if the elves had been inclined to murder them and steal the shield, they’d have been able to do it even if he’d been there.
In the sky, a dwarf was nearly as helpless as an elf trying to make its way underground through a dwarf tunnel.
“What’s the news. What did the Kingsmoot decide? Have we marched up already?”
“There hasn’t been any Kingsmoot,” Red Beard said.
“No one is marching anywhere,” Plate Armor added. “We were given orders to seal off the skydoor three days ago, but Bori spotted you through the glass. We’ve been following the goblins who were following you since this morning.”
“You were looking for me?”
“Not you in particular. We just didn’t want to leave a dwarf in the Overlands. From the sounds of it, it may be years before the skydoors open again.”
Lodi frowned, and not because of the pain. No Kingsmoot. No army on the march. The sealing of the skydoors. That could only mean one thing. The King of Iron Mountain had no intention of interfering with the orc invasion of the Overland realms of Man and Elf. The dwarves were playing turtle and pulling their head and legs into their massive, earthen shell.
“The damned fool,” he growled.
“What’s that?” one of the dwarves said.
“This damned wound!” He winced and gingerly prodded at his shoulder. Without knowing anything about his rescuers, badmouthing the king was probably unwise. Then, without warning, he found himself light-headed and staggering. Red Beard swore as he struggled to keep Lodi from falling to the ground.
“Hold your tongue, dwarf, and save your energy!”
“Is he bleeding out?” Plate Armor asked.
“No, he’s just weak and swooning from shock, not blood loss. You could take his other side.”
“Aye, I could,” Plate Armor said as he scanned the forest around them with one hand caressing the wooden shaft of his axe. “But I won’t. Them gobbos are still about.”
Fortunately for Lodi’s sake, Chain Mail was willing to help, and between him and Red Beard, they managed to half-support, half-drag him along with them.
The rest of the walk soon became a painful blur to Lodi. He somehow managed to stumble along with the help of Red Beard until he found himself in the cool darkness of a hillside cave. It had been artfully concealed by a pair of fallen trees, which were somehow raised by the use of a secret lever hidden under a stump. The cave itself appeared to be a nothing more than a simple cave with no outlet until Plate Armor pounded the butt of his axe against the smooth stone wall at the end of the cave, and the wall slid silently back to reveal a downward-sloping passageway lined with lichmoss. If the silence of the secret door was not enough to indicate that it was well-maintained, the scent of oil that filled his nose as Plate Armor slid it shut again, then pulled an arm-sized metal bar down to lock it, was.
“Ain’t no one around to come in after us, ’cept skins. We’re the last.”
Lodi was in no position to argue, as he was beginning to dip in and out of consciousness.
“Hey, now, hold on there, friend!” Chain Mail encouraged him. “We’re almost there.” Lodi tried to stay awake, but it was too much effort for him, and it was with no little relief that he closed his eyes and allowed the cool comfort of the darkness to claim him.
He awoke on the most comfortable bed he’d known in literally years. Except for a short period back home under Iron Mountain last year, he hadn’t slept on a proper dwarf bed since he’d been captured and sold into Amorran slavery. The moss-stuffed mattress was soft and sweet-smelling, and for a moment, until he shifted his body, he forgot that he’d been wounded. He hissed as the pain shot through his shoulder, and then, as if in sympathetic echo, his left leg. He’d been undressed while he was unconscious, he realized, and when he gingerly poked at where the point of the goblin lance had emerged, he discovered that his unknown benefactors had also shaved part of his chest. The wound wasn’t stitched, but it was packed with some sort of mossy herbal concoction he did not recognize.
His leg, on the other hand, had been threaded together neatly by an expert hand. It was smeared with a fungal unguent that he remembered from the war; the pungent odor it gave off was not readily forgotten. That was good. Ragged wounds of the sort the wolf had torn in his calf were easily infected, and who knew what sort of filthy carrion the beast had been feeding on before biting him.
He sighed, ruefully running his hand lightly over the bare patch on his chest. First his beard, now his chest. If things continued in this vein, the next time he’d probably find that someone had shaved his bloody bollocks. He’d look like a stumpy shaven elf if he didn’t manage to change his fortunes soon.
There were footsteps outside the door and then it opened. His visitor was a young, fair-skinned dwarfess with the palest green eyes he had ever seen. She was pretty too, even allowing for the fact that it had been a cursed long time since he’d last laid eyes on a dwarf maiden. She wasn’t even thirty yet, he estimated, as she shyly averted her eyes and placed the tray she was carrying on the little table near his head. There were bandages and pack-moss on the tray, and he wondered if the young lass had been his nurse.
“Was it you stitched me up?” he asked.
“Please don’t talk to me,” she answered without looking at him. Then she quickly left the room and shut the door, leaving him to wonder what he could have done to offend her so.
He looked at the bandages on the table. Surely he wasn’t supposed to change them himself. Not that he couldn’t, although in the absence of pack-moss he’d learned to get by with the fiery sting of spirits to clean out his wounds, but the pretty dwarfess’s strange behavior was at odds with how carefully he’d otherwise been tended.
The door opened again. This time it was an older dwarfess of perhaps 150 years, followed by a grey-bearded dwarf who carried himself with an air of authority.
“Glad to hear you’re awake and coherent,” the dwarf said in a booming voice. He extended a hand to Lodi, who was unsurprised to discover the greybeard had a firm, confident grip. “You’ll have to excuse young Audra, she was not expecting you to be alert yet. I understand your name is Lodi, of the South Goloi?”
“Lodi, son of Dunmorin, sir. As you say, my family mines the South Goloi Vein.”
“A rich one, I hope. Silver?”
“Gold, as it happens, sir.”
“Ah, all the better!” The greybeard chuckled. “We are honored! I am Morits, son of Morits, who was himself the son of Morits. We are a sadly unimaginative lot, I’m afraid. I am the mayor of this cavern, which is rather a grand way to describe what is little more than a half-buried Man village!”
Lodi eyed the ceiling, which was reinforced with timbers. It was alarmingly close to the surface, even for a high town, if the hazy recollection of his descent was a reliable guide. Well, it held no fears for one who had spent as much time under the sky as he had. He looked at the dwarfess whom the mayor had not bothered to introduce. Not his wife or a local dignitary, then, which meant she was likely a healer. “And is it you, madam, I have to thank for the care I have received?”
&n
bsp; “It was our privilege to serve such a brave warrior of the Deep, son of Dunmorin.” She smiled and curtsied. “I am Mulma, wife to Bodel, son of Hodel.”
“Charmed,” Lodi said, feeling considerably more foolish than brave. On the other hand, the formidable collection of his old scars, from the Amorran arenas as well as seven years of siege warfare prior, could hardly be denied under his present circumstances. Then his eyes narrowed. The two older dwarves were eyeing him in a suspiciously familiar manner. He had the distinct impression that they wanted something from him, and a moment later, Morits son of Morits confirmed it.
“I see this is not the first time you have recovered from such grievous wounds.”
“No, sir. I had some bad luck along the way.”
“Would you say that you heal quickly, Lodi, son of Dunmorin?”
He looked down at the big pink scar in his side that an orc gladiator had given him on the sands and remembered the long days of sheer agony he’d spent tied to the back of a donkey on the hellish ride that had taken him to the Elflands and purchased his freedom in the end. “Quick enough. What do you need from me?”
“Do you recall the young dwarfess who was in here previously?”
“The one who told me not to talk to her?”
The elder dwarfess laughed, and the sparkle in her eyes seemed to take decades off her face. “Yes, that would be Myf. I’m afraid she has some unusual perspectives. The problem we have presently is that she is of one of the Deepest clans. She only came here to deliver some very particular fungi we had ordered from her family. But with the king placing the Heights under war law, none of our dwarves are permitted to leave the upper caverns.”
“We need you to escort her below, son of Dunmorin,” the mayor clarified unnecessarily. “It seemed likely that you were intending to descend, so we thought perhaps you might be willing to see her safely to her clan.”
Lodi stroked his beard, such as it was. The lass didn’t sound like an ideal travel companion, but a silent one would be better than an overly talkative one. And she would have to pass through Iron Mountain if she was headed for the Heart of Fire, which was where the Deepest dwelled. “I can take her as far as Iron Mountain. Beyond that will depend upon the King. But if I can’t take her deeper, I vow I’ll find someone who can, someone reliable.”
“What will depend upon the King?”
“I’m Kingsguard.”
Mulma and the mayor looked at each other, visibly startled. “You’re Kingsguard?” the dwarfess said. “What are you doing in the Above?”
“In a manner of speaking. I don’t do a lot of guarding anymore, but I still do a few odd jobs for His Majesty from time to time.” He smiled at the mayor’s discomfiture. “I’ll take care of the lass if the Bodel-wife here can get me back on my feet, or at least my arse, before the tunnel-train arrives. If you’re in the habit of trading with the Deepest, I can only assume this is a shaft terminus.”
“Three days,” the mayor said, eyeing Lodi with a mix of suspicion and respect. He wasn’t the sort of dwarf to appreciate his sense of self-importance being trumped and Lodi’s offhand reference to the King of Iron Mountain had thrown him for a loss. “The next one is scheduled to arrive in three days. After that, with a war on, who can say?”
Lodi nodded and glanced at the bandages on the table. “Well, Madame Bodel-wife, if I have only three days to recover, we had better be sure any blood-rot is cleaned out, or the only thing accompanying your young Myf will be my corpse!”
Marcus
The roan he’d been gifted by the royal councillor was bigger and more powerful than the Bithnyan ones to which he was accustomed. A stallion, it was even bigger than Fortex’s Incitatus. Marcus supposed the larger horses were necessary, considering the heavy steel armor worn from head to toe by the Savondese cavalrymen, but he wondered about their stamina. The big roan was spirited, though, and made for a boon companion on Marcus’s morning rides that marked his only escape from the ever-present duties of the legion.
He wasn’t alone, of course, although the pair of knights who accompanied him were gracious enough to remain well behind him, in sight but far enough back that he could seldom hear them. It was only an illusion of solitude, but it was a welcome one nonetheless. He had much upon which to muse and this was the one time of day when he could be certain to be free from the regular series of interruptions that never failed to shatter his train of thought.
The sheer numbers of the orcs they would soon be facing was a challenge, but at least it was a known one. There were a myriad of ways in which a commander could address his numerical disadvantage, especially one who had the benefit of knowing his men were better trained, better armed, and more disciplined than the enemy. The orcs might be stronger and more powerful than the goblins his men had faced in Gorignia, but everything he had read, and everyone to whom he had spoken, assured him that he need have no fears for the centuries that threw back the charge of Legio VII.
Of more concern was the unknown threat posed by the orcish devil-magic. Here the centurions who had experience fighting the orc were of little help, none of them having been privy to the discussions of either the generals or the Michaelines to whom the responsibility for negating the enemy magic fell. The Savondese accompanying him were too young to have any experience of it themselves and although he suspected de Forbonnais of being a kingsmage, the young noble wasn’t about to admit to being a warmage while surrounded by devout Amorran soldiers who might well be inclined to burn him first and ask permission of their commander later.
Nor was Frontinus of much assistance either. To his disappointment, there were relatively few descriptions of battles against the orc and the scanty references to enemy magic were more allusive than descriptive. It seemed the great strategist had found it wise to be delicate in his description of such forbidden tactics, even those utilized by the soiled and godless enemy.
What was one to make of sentences such as this? “The accursed enemy’s devilries struck fear into Proximus’s right, prompting many a legionary to quake and turn white with fear.”
Was it a spell that had been cast upon them? Had a demon been summoned, the sight of which had struck men dumb with terror? Or perhaps it was merely the illusion of a summoning, a false image designed to fool unwary and innocent minds? Or was “devilries” no reference to dark magics at all, but merely a description of the evil antics of the subhuman warriors? Frontinus did not say.
Such tactics as were described were precisely as Marcus had seen his father and Saturnius utilize in his first battle, when Legio XVII destroyed the two goblin tribes. Keen-eyed spotters were assigned to the ballistarii, who targeted the enemy magicians with artillery as soon as they were identified. Large and heavy rocks were an effective antidote to occult weaponry. But what if the orc-shamans were more capable than their goblin counterparts and smart enough to focus their spells on the ballistae first? It was bad enough to be without the priests of St. Michael, but if the artillery was destroyed, the legion would be forced to rely on its slingers and archers. And he could not find anyone to reliably tell him what sort of range these orc-shamans might have.
What he really needed was a test engagement, a limited battle that would allow him to feel out the enemy’s capabilities without risking serious loss to his men. But the strategic situation didn’t allow for that, not with the main body of orcs only a few weeks’ march to the east. The strategic imperative was clear. He had to sever the tendril, cut it off and destroy it entirely before it could be reinforced. And that would require taking the sort of risk that he was extremely loathe to take.
He sighed. If there was one thing he had learned from Corvus, it was that strategy always trumped tactics. He had no choice but to roll the dice and gamble that his ignorance of the orc would hurt him less than the orc general’s ignorance of the legion. But if he had to roll the dice, perhaps he could arrange to see that the dice were loaded, however slightly, and increase the odds in his favor.
A shou
t came from behind him, drawing his attention. He pulled at the reins, turning the roan around, and saw that a decurion was riding towards him at a gallop from the direction of the camp. Frowning, he kicked his horse into a trot; the two knights of his guard were already moving to intercept the incoming rider. What was it now? It could be anything, but of one thing he was certain: it wasn’t good news the decurion was bearing.
“Lord Valerius!” The decurion saluted as Marcus approached. “The primus pilus sends me to request that you return to the camp immediately!”
“Why?” He couldn’t place the decurion’s name, but recognized him as an officer of the Second. He looked around, and neither heard nor saw anything out of the ordinary. It didn’t appear they were under attack.
The cavalry officer glanced meaningfully at the two knights. They took the hint and kicked their horses into a trot towards the castra. “Two legionaries from the Fourth were out on firewood duty this morning. One of the cavalry patrols came across them…”
His voice trailed off.
“And what?” Marcus demanded, his relief that the castra wasn’t under attack transforming itself into irritation. “A patrol came across them and what?”
“One was using the other,” the decurion said, his eyes cast down and his voice tight with disgust. “In an unnatural manner.”
“Great filth!” Marcus swore inadvertently. The decurion blinked, surprised by the unexpected outburst, but then nodded in confirmation.
“I’m afraid so, general. The patrol escorted them back to the castra and Sintas Tertius has placed both men under arrest.”
Marcus closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The unsettling news would delay the morning’s march no matter how he elected to handle the situation. Such a gross violation of legionary law could not possibly be ignored, and the fact that the guilty men had been marched back to the camp and handed over to the primus pilus meant there was no chance that he could look the other way even if he were inclined to do so. Which was most certainly not the case.